If Wishes Were Horses
' |image= |series= |production=40511-416 |producer(s)= |story=Nell McCue Crawford and William L. Crawford |script=Nell McCue Crawford, William L. Crawford and Michael Piller |director=Robert Legato |imdbref=tt0708551 |guests=Keone Young as Buck Bokai, Rosalind Chao as Keiko O'Brien, Hana Hatae as Molly O'Brien and Michael J. Anderson as Rumpelstiltskin |previous_production=Progress |next_production=The Forsaken |episode= DS9 S01E15 |airdate=16 May 1993 |previous_release=Progress |next_release=The Forsaken |story_date(s)=46853.2 (2369) |previous_story=(DS9) Progress (Overall) Rightful Heir |next_story=(DS9) The Forsaken (Overall) Second Chances }} Summary Quark advises Constable Odo to lighten up, perhaps in a holosuite. Odo dismisses imagination as inattention to real life. Quark offers to create for him a shapeshifter "playmate", to which Odo retorts, "You're disgusting!" Seeing the station commander's young son, Jake Sisko, approaching a holosuite, Odo warns Quark he had better not have created any playmates for him. Quark explains that Jake's program includes famous baseball players from Earth. Dr. Julian Bashir and Lt. Jadzia Dax eat lunch. Julian wants a romantic relationship, but Jadzia politely refuses, pointing out he has also eyed other women. Dax returns to Ops, from where she observes elevated emissions in the nearby Denorius Belt. She and Commander Sisko hypothesize this to be due to the high amount of traffic at Deep Space Nine. Chief O'Brien reads to his daughter Molly the story Rumpelstiltskin and tucks her into bed. Shortly, she comes out of her room and claims Rumpelstiltskin is inside. O'Brien and his wife Keiko patiently return with her and find that Rumpelstiltskin is indeed in her room. Elsewhere, an alternate Jadzia attempts to seduce Bashir in his quarters, and Buck Bokai, a 21st Century baseball player who in 2026 broke Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak, has followed Jake from the holodeck. The characters disappear when rejected or ignored. Unprecedented events, such as snow on the Promenade, occur across the station, apparently instigated by people's imaginations. Quark finds himself escorted by beautiful, adoring women, and hopes the situation will last forever, until he notices his customers are winning at Dabo. He desperately wishes them to lose, but to no effect: as Odo points out, Quark is outnumbered. Odo returns to his office, and discovers he has wished Quark into a holding cell. The wishing outbreak continues until the emissions detected earlier form into a void near the station. It grows exponentially until Sisko realizes it is part of the wish effect, and will continue growing so long as people believe it exists. He instructs his crew that it does not exist, and to stand down from alert status. The crisis is averted. Later, "Buck Bokai" appears in Sisko's office, where he explains that he is part of an extended mission of exploration that followed a ship through the Wormhole. His people wanted to see what imagination is really about, in order to learn more about humanoids. The aliens did nothing themselves: they only observed the effects of humanoid imagination. Before leaving, he suggests they may one day return. Errors and Explanations Plot Oversights # Bashir sleeping in bed wearing his uniform. Maybe he’s using the bed for a powernap? Changed Premises Explanations in this section submitted to Nit Central by LUIGI NOVI on Friday, January 04, 2002 - 10:14 am unless stated otherwise: # Quark has to explain to Odo that Jake plays baseball in the holosuites. Odo must have improved his intelligence techniques by the end of Facets, because in that episode, he knows what Bashir has for breakfast. The reason that Odo knew what Bashir has for breakfast is because Bashir probably eats out in the open with Garak at Quarks’s or the Replimat, where Odo can see them, and possibly in addition because Odo began eating lunch with Garak after The Die is Cast, not because Odo deliberately keeps a file on the subject. The reason he is ignorant of Jake’s holosuite use is because it takes place in a closed room, and is not relevant to station security, not because his intelligence is lackluster by the time of this episode, nor because he spies on Bashir by the latter. After all, Phil, how in the world is Jake’s holosuite activities or what Bashir has for breakfast pertinent to Odo’s intelligence? Odo doesn’t spy on people when they are engaged in private activity. Do you honestly think Jake’s holodeck activites or Bashir’s breakfast are of any intelligence worth? Jeff Muscato on Monday, January 31, 2005 - 11:39 am: (Nit Central) Everything has intelligence worth. If a changeling-Bashir suddenly starts eating a slightly different breakfast, it'd be nice of Odo to notice that's something wrong with Bashir. # Attempting to mollify Bashir’s embarrassment over the Dax kitten, Dax tells him she was a young man himself "once." Actually, later episodes establish Dax has had THREE male hosts whose memories she should have. In Facets, O’Brien receives Tobin’s memories, Bashir gets Torias’s, and Odo gets Curzon’s. I suppose we could say that two of these three men received the Dax symbiont when they were middle-aged, but "Dax" establishes that most hosts receive it in their twenties. I’m not sure I understand the point of this nit. What exactly is it? Near as I can tell, you seem to be taking umbrage at Dax’s use of the word "once." First of all, the word, as she uses it here, is not meant to be number-specific. She is simply telling Bashir that she was a young man in the past, not how many times she was one. Second, why do you presume that any of them received the symbiont when middle-aged? Neither Facets nor any other episode ever implied such a thing. Third, what does that have to do with her use of the word "once"? # In this episode, Buck Bokai mentions to Sisko that he’s a third baseman. But in The Big Goodbye (TNG)]], Data said that he was a shortstop. The Star Trek Encyclopedia says Bokai started out at shortstop, and then switched to third base. But did Bokai break the record as a shortstop? If he broke it as a third baseman, Data would have said "third baseman." So he broke the record before switching to third base. What’s wrong with this? Equipment Oddities # O’Brien managing to install pulse wave devices in the torpedoes from his console at Ops.He could be installing the devices remotely for safety reasons. # The Red Alert lights not illuminating when Kira attempts to restore communications after the explosion. The lights could have suffered intermittent damage from the force of the explosion. Continuity And Production Problems Explanations in this section submitted to Nit Central by LUIGI NOVI on Friday, January 04, 2002 - 10:14 am unless stated otherwise: # After Bashir arrives in Ops with the Dax kitten, the real Dax shows up, and later walks behind the former two. As she does the camera focus blurs on the real Dax. It’s almost like the creators were trying to cover up the fact that the person walking behind Bashir is a body double for Terry Farrell. Also, the person walking turns her head conveniently away from the camera to further obscure her identity. (If this person is a double body, she’s an excellent one. She looks a lot like Dax.) Phil, are you kidding? A body double? How can you possibly be under the impression that this was not Terry Farrell? Look at the scene again. In the beginning of this shot, the camera is on her, on only on her, as she answers Bashir’s question! The faux Dax says she must have come out of Bashir’s imagination, and Bashir then asks the real Dax how this sort of thing might have happened. The camera then cuts to the real Dax, obviously played by Terry Farrell, who answers, "A subspace disruption. Maybe some kind of dimensional shift..." She says the word "dimensional" as she begins to walk behind Bashir and the faux Dax. She does blur, but this is probably in order to disguise the special effect used to make the double shot, which may have become evident when the two shots of Farrell overlapped. How can it be a body double (not a "double body," as you called it—wink, wink:)) if the camera was on her face in the beginning of the shot, and it was a continuous shot when she walked behind the two of them? Nit Central # LUIGI NOVI on Friday, January 04, 2002 - 10:14 am: When everyone starts winning at Dabo at Quark’s in Act 2, Quark panics. Why doesn’t he just close down the gambling games until the current subspace rupture problem is resolved? It would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, especially for a Ferengi. kerriem. on Friday, January 04, 2002 - 11:18 am: OK, this is a little lame, I admit, but...Maybe he's afraid of the customers getting hostile with him? I'm guessing that dedicated gamblers - or any gambler on a winning streak - would have been really really ticked at being cut off for whatever reason...and Ferengi are noted for their, erm, self-preservation instincts. So Quark's panic could have been a result of being caught between a rock and a (closed-down) place. Category:Episodes Category:Deep Space Nine